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What the U.S. Withdrawal from Syria Means for the Kurds - and for Israel
(Forward) Yossi Alpher - President Trump is consistent about keeping American forces out of conflicts in the Middle East. He wants U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The game of abandoning the Kurds has been going on for a long time. It started when the League of Nations awarded the Kurds their own state in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres. Nothing came of that noble gesture, not least due to persistent Kurdish disunity. The abandonment game had culminated in the refusal of all countries but Israel to support a September 2017 Iraqi Kurdish independence referendum which ended in a disastrous setback at the hands of Iraq's Arab government. For anyone who has entertained doubts about the need for a state for the Jewish people, the Kurds represent a tragic reminder. They are consistently being abandoned to an ugly fate because they don't have a country. The writer is a former Mossad official and former director of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.